Number: number

In Armenian, Number is a feature of nouns and other parts of speech that mark agreement with nouns, i.e. personal pronouns, and verbs.

Some geographical names appear only in the plural form (e.g. Ալպեր “The Alps”, Ապալաչներ “Appalachian Mountains”) even though they denote one thing (semantic singular). We don’t mark these proper nouns as Ptan (plurale tantum). Grammatically they behave like plurals, so Plur is obviously the back-off value here.

In Armenian some nouns, proper nouns and pronouns appear in the plural form, which denotes constructions like ‘X and other people associated with X’. These plural forms consist of a noun X (typically of human reference, usually a person’s name or a kin term) and one of the suffixes -ենք, -անք, -ոնք, -ունք.

As nominal syntactic subjects, associative plural forms are grammaticalty indefinte (even though they are known and concrete).

Collective or mass or singulare tantum is a special case of singular. It applies to words that use grammatical singular to describe sets of objects, i.e. semantic plural. Although in theory they might be able to form plural, in practice it would be rarely semantically plausible. Sometimes, the plural form exists and means “several sorts of” or “several packages of”.